Opening prayer
Read the italicized passages of Scripture in Chapter 5.
Questions
- How is the “irrelevant detail” in Mark’s Gospel (like when he mentions that there are other boats nearby the boat that Jesus is in and that Jesus is asleep on a cushion) serve as evidence that Mark is giving us Peter’s first-hand account of those actual events (pp. 49-50)?
- When Jesus commanded the storm to be still, he did not call upon the name of a higher power. He simply commanded the storm himself. What does this say about Jesus and power?
- Why is it comforting for us to know that Jesus is the Lord of the storm (p. 52)?
- Do we, like the disciples, sometimes think that if God really loved me he wouldn’t allow me to go through this storm? What is the truth about God, his love and the storms we experience?
- Why were the disciples more terrified in the calm than they were in the storm (pp. 53-54)?
- Timothy Keller includes this quote from Elisabeth Elliot, “God is God, and since he is God, he is worthy of my worship and my service. I will find rest nowhere else but in his will, and that will is necessarily infinitely, immeasurably, unspeakably beyond my largest notions of what he is up to” (54). How does being in God’s will comfort us when we are in the middle of a storm?
- Timothy Keller writes “People who believe more must not be hard on those who believe less.” What reason does he give? If we applied his statement to our lives, what would that look like?
- Where do we go for faith?
- How does the account of Jesus and the storm parallel the account of Jonah and the storm?
- When we are facing our own personal storms, how does it help to have the image of Jesus facing the ultimate storm on the cross burned into the core of our being?
Closing Prayer
Farewell to Shadowlands 